R.I.P.: Anne Francis & Jill Haworth

A shared page of final respect to two babes of the past who in all likelihood never even knew each other and really have almost nothing in common, other than that the early promise of their careers never fully paid out and they died within a day of each other. And they both made films that we at A Wasted Life have watched and enjoyed. Those films, and their former status as cute nubiles, have earned them our respects.

Anne Francis

16 September 1930 (Ossining, NY) – 2 January 2011 (Santa Barbara, CA)

Of the two, Anne Francis is undoubtedly the better known. Once upon a time, she was a hot tamale with (according to Celebrity Sleuth) the measurements of 34-22-35 in 1953, when she was 23, and 36-24-35 ½ from 1965-66, when she was 35 and starring in the legendary TV series Honey West. She was well into her 81st year when she died of pancreatic cancer on January 3rd.
Ms. Francis first entered the film business at the age of 17 in 1947, but she had been modeling since the age of 5 and acting (on stage) since she was 11. Starting off well in films featuring the likes of the young Judy Garland, Anne went on to co-headline a couple of noteworthy classics, but if any of her films are remembered for her being in them, the one that comes to mind first is the classic if very loose Sci-Fi interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest: Forbidden Planet (1956).
Despite the memorable films she made, like so many a cute and talented young thing, her career on the big screen proved limited: by the early-60s, despite the occasional part in a feature-length film, Anne Francis was basically a television personality – which is what she remained all the way up to her last appearance on the small screen in 2004 in an episode of Without A Trace entitled Shadows.
Anne Francis – gone but not forgotten.

So Young So Bad (1950)

Who knows if this juvenile delinquent film is any good, but it gets listed here 'cause everyone loves a bad girl flick and its poster is so groovy. Anne Francis, kitten with claws…

Rogue Cop (1954)

A run-of-the-mill film noir, but another great poster. And her name was already getting a lot more prominent...

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

The classic John Sturges thriller – and what a lineup of classic stars. Well worth watching the next time it shows up on late night TV.

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

All right! The granddaddy to a good dozen exploitation flicks, most famously the classic 1982 exploiter The Class of 1984 (trailer) and, tangentially, The Class of 1999 (1990 / trailer) and Class of 1999 II: The Substitute (1994 / trailer). Based on a novel by the former teacher named Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Albert Lombino, better known by his later pen name Ed McBain, the film launched a little ditty titled Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets, which well helped dictate the future of popular music. One of the first films of Sidney Poitier (28 at the time), who played the good juvenile delinquent vis-a-vis Vic Morrow (26) in his film debut as the bad juvi. (Jamie Farr also made his debut in the film as a bad boy.) Anne Francis has the co-starring role as Glen Ford's terrified and troubled wife….

Forbidden Planet (1956)

As is the case with Leslie Nielsen, this film alone would make us pay our respects to Anne Francis. A truly great science fiction film from the Golden Age of Sci Fi Film, this film is a classic that never bores and can be watched again and again and again… isn't it about time you finally saw it, too?

The Crowded Sky (1960)

Anne Francis never really made bad films in the sense of exploitation or skid row productions; any bad films she did were more of the Hollywood miscalculation kind, films that surely sounded good on paper and have all the right ingredients but then turn out to be stinkers (think last year's The Tourist [trailer] as an excellent contemporary example). This film is probably her first of that type of cinematic failure. To simply quote the website DVD Talk: "A main contender in the too-silly-to-be-true aerial jeopardy race is 1960's The Crowded Sky, a hugely enjoyable Bad Movie that piles one embarrassingly trite dramatic scene atop another. The film's fateful mid-air collision is so thoroughly telegraphed that every character seems to be saying to themselves, 'Do I have enough time for an extra flashback to my troubled personal life, or are we about to be hit by another plane?'" Trash pure.

The Satan Bug (1965)

Ah, yes: The Satan Bug. This film was supposed to be the career maker of George Maharis, seen here to the left in a photo from a pictorial he did for Playgirl in 1973, eight years after this film. "George, who?" you ask. Maharis was, like Rock Hudson and George Nader, what they used to call a "confirmed bachelor" who became a teenage heartthrob in the early 60s due to the TV series Route 66, which he left to try his luck on the silver screen. He took part in a lot of Hollywood big budget projects, including this incredibly dry and star-studded espionage thriller adapted from an Alistair MacLean novel of the same name, but he never made the crossover to big name stardom. (For that, however, he actually starred in a lot more real and memorable trash than Anne Francis ever did before he finally retired in 1993.) Anne Francis plays his pretty wife in the movie, a rather secondary role that really does nothing other than help underscore just how wooden Maharis was as an actor.

Brainstorm (1965)

Author Jack Stevenson placed Brainstorm on his list of top ten films ever made for Sight and Sound in 2002, and according to the film website Noir of the Week, Brainstorm is "one of noir's bleakest installments - neo, or classic." A forgotten B&W that truly deserves rediscovery. Anne Francis as the women in need following a double agenda.

Killer Cain / More Dead Than Alive (1969)

OK, in this film Anne Francis has a relatively unimportant role, but its length and importance merely echoes where her career was at the time. But Vincent Price is wonderfully conniving, and the film as a whole is a lot better than its reputation.

The Love God? (1969)

A Don Knotts film, and one of his odder ones at that: He plays Mr. Peacock – is that a joke? – a mild-mannered birdwatcher who gets transformed into a Hugh Hefner type stud. The film is actually rather funny, in a dated kind of way, not just as a Don Knotts film but as a satire of its time. Groovy trailer, too.

Pancho Villa (1972)

Telly Savalas as Pancho Villa?!?

Detour to Terror (1980)

TV movie with Anne Francis as a cancer survivor wearing a wig stuffed with cash, Detour to Terror also features O.J. Simpson as the bus driver hero, Arte Johnson as the tour guide, Lorenzo Lamas as a busjacker – and, in an uncredited part as one of the passengers, Nicole Brown Simpson.

Jill Haworth

15 August 1945 (Sussex, England) – 3 January 2011 (New York City, NY)

What? You never heard of her? Well, that ain't surprising, actually – she hadn't made a film since 2001, and even before then her presence on the silver screen was less than constant or truly noticeable. Like Anne Francis (who was "discovered" by Darryl F. Zanuck), Haworth had the luck of being discovered at a young age (15) by a powerful name: Otto Preminger. She was featured in three films by him as well as an odd selection of foreign projects, but by 1963 it was obvious that her name would never headline awnings – at least not of movie houses. She did pretty well on Broadway, where she was Sally Bowles in the hit in the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966-69), but she got passed over for the film version, thus ensuring that her film career would never be a big one. To buy groceries, she took part in a small but fine selection of true exploitation projects and trash classics – in all respects. One wishes that she had made even more such films.

Exodus (1960)

Her debut film, which is the only reason it's being listed here on A Wasted Life. Jill Haworth even gets mentioned in the trailer. Big budget, star-studded serious ham, to say the least…

It! (1966)

Written and directed by Herbert J. Leder, the man behind the extremely disturbing short film The Child Molester (1964 / full film) – which, produced as a public safety message film, was quickly pulled after a very brief release – and the cheesy B&W horror flick The Frozen Dead (1967 / trailer), which was shown as part of a double feature with It! in the USA. It! is a fun, rather cheesy horror film with a Hammer-look featuring Roddy McDowell as an unstable young museum worker named Arthur Pimm who lives with his dead, mummified mommy. He gains control of a Golem and uses it to rid the world of those in his way and to get the girl of his dreams, Ellen Grove, played by Jill. The cheesecake shot of Jill seen above comes from the dream scene of Pimm...

The Haunted House of Horror (1969)

Tagline: "Behind its forbidden doors an evil secret hides!" Directed by no less than Michael Armstrong, who went on the next year to do the classic Mark of the Devil (1970 / trailer), The Haunted House of Horror features Jill and the then almost 30-year-old Frankie Avalon as two of a group of young adults out for some fun by spending the night in a deserted country mansion, which results in the mysterious knifing of one of them. The rest hush-up the event, but as to be expected in this proto-slasher, more deaths follow...

Home for the Holidays (1972)A TV slasher from before modern slashers even really began filling the screen – Halloween came in 1978 – which is why the film owes more in look and feel to a (bloodless) giallo thriller, which weren't exactly rare drive-in fodder at the time. Great cast: Walter Brennan as the dying man who invites his four daughters back to the family house to kill his wife (Julie Harris of The Haunting [1963 / trailer]), who he thinks is poisoning him. The daughters are played by Sally Field (!), Eleanor Parker, Jessica Walter (the psycho from the Clint Eastwood's overrated directorial debut, Play Misty for Me [1971 / trailer]), and Jill Haworth. In this Christmas-set thriller, which has rather a cult following, Jill is one of the pitchforked victims. There doesn't seem to be a trailer of it anywhere online, so here’s the first 7 minutes instead:

Tower of Evil (1972)

Leonarr Martin, that famed film pundit for Middle America with a Tea-Party brain, gives this film a bomb rating in his Movie Guide, but less-mundanely minded individuals have begun to reassess the film as being much better than its less-than-stellar reputation implies, citing it as an interesting and moody mixture of Gothic and slasher elements. A group of archaeologists go to an island in search of an ancient treasure and start dying nasty deaths…

The Mutations (1974)

One of the sleaziest exploitation films of the 70s to come out of England, Jill deserves mention on A Wasted Life alone for participating in this ocular atrocity. A film that is truly unforgettable, even if her participation on screen is, since she's around for such a short time. Click the title above to go the full review...

Short Film: X-Mess Detritus (USA, 2008)

Here's a film for the Holiday Seasons! Aurelio Voltaire Hernández, born January 25, 1967, in Havana, Cuba, is better known simply as Voltaire, the middle name he shares with the famous French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher François-Marie Arouet. The choice of using his middle name as his stage name as an obvious reference of respect to his historical namesake, who, according to the New-Jersey-raised filmmaker, comic artist and musician, "saw through the hypocrisies of humanity and commented on them through satire. In essence, he was able to educate people about the world around them by making them laugh."
Voltaire’s films do not necessarily make one laugh, but they do very much grab one's attention and make an obvious and direct statement on the human condition of the contemporary world.
In addition to his musical, artistic and filmic activities, Voltaire is also a professor at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, where he teaches stop-motion animation. He began making films as a child, influenced by the films of Ray Harryhausen. Moving to NYC at 17, a year later he got his first directorial project for MTV and created the "MTV Bosch" station identifications broadcast between music videos. He went on to do similar ID adverts for (among others) the Cartoon Network, U.S. and the Sci-Fi channel.
X-Mess Detritus is one of a series of different films be different filmmakers featured at the wonderfulll Creepy Christmas website, a site well worth visiting in and out of the Holiday Season. It is narrated by Gerard Way of the band My Chemical Romance, with music and sound by Amar Ibrahim. Cool stuff.

Mary and Max (Australia, 2009)

"When I was young, I invented an invisible friend called Mr Ravioli. My psychiatrist says I don't need him anymore, so he just sits in the corner and reads."

Max Jerry Horovitz

Over the last 14 years, the talented Australian animation filmmaker Adam Elliot has had a small but consistently amazing output of wonderful stop-motion short films, and his first feature-length film, Mary and Max, carries on his tradition of touching, ironic tales that playfully present the ups and downs, the highs and lows, of lives substantially less than perfect. The technical finesse of his chosen media—claymation—keeps changing (as in "improving"), but his insightful and wry eye remains the same. As in the three shorts of family trilogy—Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998—the Short Film of the Month of May 2009 here at A Wasted Life) and Brother (1999)—and his Oscar-winning short Harvie Crumpet (2003 / full film), the tale told in Mary and Max could have easily become mean-spirited and tasteless in the wrong hands, but Elliot manages to keep the film warm and tender and wonderfully sensitive no matter how black the humor sometimes is and how depressing the events might be. In Mary and Max, as in his shorts, the lives presented are hardly ideal and often verge on being dismal, but as bittersweet as they are he manages to present them in a wry manner that is more sweet then bitter.

"Do you have a favorite-sounding word? My top-five are 'ointment,' 'bumblebee,' 'Vladivostok,' 'banana,' and 'testicle.'"
Max Jerry Horovitz

The tale told in Mary and Max hardly sounds like one that could hold anyone's interest for longer than a few minutes, much less than for an hour and a half, but the film remains mesmerizing from start to finish. Beginning in 1976, the simple story follows the 20-year exchange of letters between two misfit pen pals: Mary Dinkle, a plump and lonely eight-year-old of suburban Melbourne and Max Horovitz, an obese, atheist Jew with Asperger's Syndrome surviving in New York City. Mary arbitrarily chooses a name from a NYC phonebook she flips through while her alcoholic mother is busy shoplifting envelopes at a post office, and the exchange of mail initiated by her innocent first letter serves as the central thread around which the life experiences of both characters are revealed. There is no excessive action, adventure or suspense in the oft laughter- and smile-inducing but nonetheless poignant if not occasionally tragic and depressing tale of two lost and friendless souls that find true friendship in their exchange of missives; instead, enveloped within an environment of mostly browns (for Australia) and grays (for New York) and an occasional splash of pure color, Mary and Max gleefully bounces around and ironically touches upon topics as diverse as horny dogs, religion, where babies come from, alcoholism, betrayal, kleptomania, love, obesity, fate, chocolate and death.

"Unfortunately, in America, babies are not found in cola cans. I asked my mother when I was four, and she said they came from eggs laid by rabbis. If you aren't Jewish, they're laid by Catholic nuns. If you're an atheist, they're laid by dirty, lonely prostitutes."
Max Jerry Horovitz

Mary and Max opens with a brief statement that the film is "based on true events," and as such it is based on a long-term exchange that Adam Elliot has had with a pen pal living in NYC: Max is the pen pal, while the life of the young Mary is inspired by Elliot's own childhood in the suburbs of Australia. But the film is hardly documentary in nature or an obviously 100% accurate reflection of reality; many an embellishment or exaggeration is apparent, but for all the creative freedom taken in the narrative the film never slides into puerile or cloying fantasy. There is, for all the eccentricity of the events shown, an underlying connection to the daily disappointments and sadness that can make life so difficult, so hard to bear. At the same time, as uninviting as life sometimes seems to be in Mary and Max, the film retains an oddly optimistic outlook. Happiness, it seems, is a matter of coming to terms with and accepting who and what you are.

"Not much has happened since I last wrote except for my manslaughter charges, lotto win, and Ivy's death."
Max Jerry Horovitz

Mary and Max brims with a bizarre creativity in its narrative and a masterful grasp of its technique (the latter which took 57 weeks in which a crew of six animators averaged about four seconds each a day). It is without a doubt a masterpiece of its genre and very much a film for adults. Not that the film is in any way truly unfit for children, it is simply that the jokes and events are probably much too adult, and the tragic humor much too subtle, for a child to truly find entertaining. As an adult, feature-length "cartoon", however, Mary and Max is a beautiful, tender and highly entertaining piece of filmmaking that by no means should be missed.

"He's scared of outside, which is a disease called homophobia."
Young Mary (in reference to her housebound neighbor Len Hislop)

28 Weeks Later (Great Britain, 2007)

Way back in 2002, when some of you who are now wasting your life reading blogs like this were perhaps still reading Dick & Jane, the English maestro of style Danny Boyle helped reinvent the zombie film with the modern horror classic 28 Days Later (trailer). In the film, animal activists accidentally release "Rage", a fast-acting virus — we're talking in seconds — upon England that causes all those infected to turn into enraged killers. Technically, the fast-footed and crazed killers of the film are not zombies, as they are very much alive, but the single-minded urge to kill and eviscerate man that the virally infected of Boyle's film all share is analogous to the viral and hungry running dead as introduced two years later in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (trailer), a surprisingly excellent remake of George Romero's dated but still-great original from 1978 (trailer). (Fast and viral-crazed blood-thirsty maniacs that run were not unknown in horror before 28 Days Later, however, as the concept of a rage-like virus had already been explored by Romero in his other early low budget classic The Crazies [1973 / trailer] and unstoppable fast-moving home surgeons are found in Umberto Lenzi's entertaining exploiter Incubo sulla città contaminate / Nightmare City [1980 / trailer].)
Whether or not the infected of 28 Days Later are "real” zombies or not is an argument of tertiary importance to a few other facts: The film re-introduced and help popularize the contemporary concept of fast and enraged zombies that are the stronghold of today's zombie films, and the film is one fucking excellent and effective piece of filmmaking, marred only by an unbelievable happy ending. If you haven't seen it yet, you should. (The film's one major flaw, an unbelievable ending involving a non-fatal shot through the stomach [one of the most fatal kinds of shot wounds there are], is alleviated for those who prefer more believable endings by a believable and more-effective alternative ending on the DVD.)
That a sequel would follow was a given the minute that 28 Days Later made waves and money. And five years later, in 2007, the next film in the franchise finally hit the theatres. This time around Boyle sat back (but for some second-unit work) and simply joined his regular producer Andrew Macdonald on the sidelines, leaving the new film in the hands of the relatively unknown Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a man with (at the time) only one full-length feature film credit to his name, the stylistically assured and interesting if overly artsy Intacto (2001 / trailer). The film Fresnadillo delivered to Boyle & Macdonald, 28 Weeks Later, proved almost as successful with the critics as the first, and likewise raked in the money, so it is hardly unexpected that 28 Months Later has long been announced as in production.
Good reviews and box office receipts aside, the real question is whether 28 Weeks Later is a good film. And, yes, it is — but it is not the great film that everyone seems to think it is. Without a doubt the opening scene is excellent if not a masterpiece of terror, and the final scene is at least a truly logical conclusion to the events, but that which is in between, as well shot as it sometimes is, too often falls into the realm of let's-make-it-scary instead of let's-make-it-believable. The film suffers from one too many plot aspects that scream "only in the movies," and as a result it leaves a taste of dissatisfaction that, in the end, slightly overpowers and thus totally weakens the film's effectiveness.
One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist — or a political science major, for that matter — to see Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later as an allegory of the United States involvement in Afghanistan (or Iraq, take your pick), but it does help to keep the idea in mind so as to see the total lack of involvement of the military of any other European land as logical. (OK, the troop is supposedly a NATO troop, but where are the non-US troops? Believable, it is not: England succumbs to a virus of apocalyptic proportions and no European — or Commonwealth — country is involved in the NATO troops sent to clean up the aftermath and repopulate the city.) But politics aren't the main point of 28 Weeks Later; the point of the film is to thrill and scare you, and occasionally gross you out with some top notch and bloody special effects. And that, at least, it does well.
In what is well the best interlude of the entire movie, the film opens with Don (Robert Carlyle of Trainspotting [1996 / trailer], Ravenous [1999 / trailer] and Ronny Yu's The 51st State [2001 / trailer]) and Alice (Catherine McCormack), their children safe in the US, hiding in a country house with four other survivors. When the house is attacked by a roaming band of rage-infected, Don is forced to abandon Alice and save himself, which he barely manages to do. From the opening moments of Don and Alice endearments to the believable interaction of the survivors, the frenzy and terror of the attack, the tragedy and mounting anarchy of the horrific events literally knock the viewer from the comfort of their sofa. The opening of 28 Weeks Later is without a doubt effective, horrific and completely believable — it's a shame the rest of the film isn't likewise.
Following a brief timeline explaining the history of the rage outbreak up until the re-population of London 28 weeks later, the kids Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy Mackintosh Muggleton) are reunited with Don, who works as a sort of general manager (and therefore has a pass card that enables him to enter everywhere — including areas that logically should be of high security). Later, Tammy and Andy easily sneak out of the high-security zone (right) to go to their old home to collect some personal items. What do you know, their Mom is still alive and living in the attic (right). The army arrives and instead of shooting her, take her back to home base, where Scarlet (Rose Byrne of Sunshine [2007 / trailer] and the horrendously crappy Alex Proyas film Knowing [2009 / trailer]), the doc in charge, figures out that she's an infected carrier and could hold the key to a cure. Commander Stone (Idris Elba) orders Mom to be killed, but before that can happen Don sneaks in (right) and they kiss and make up. Thus Don is infected with rage and, after brutally killing his wife, he goes on a rampage killing and spreading the virus. Alice goes to save the kids, but Andy gets separated in the melee. He ends up locked in the basement by the military with all the other civilians — for their safety (?). Don breaks in (right) and all hell breaks loose, but Andy escapes through the air vents and before you know what happens he survives the free for all on the streets and finds Alice and Tammy (right). Then the sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner of Dahmer [2002 / trailer]) shows up to try to lead everyone to safety as the military basically incinerates London and everyone on the streets. Not only must they make it past a military out to obliterate and sterilize everything, but Don is actually hunting his kids. (An unbelievable development that can only be swallowed if the viewer accepts the idea that the virus has changed and those infected are no longer simply homicidally bonkers but can now think and plan to a limited extent. Indeed, for Don to get out and around like he does following his infection, he probably had to use his pass card — not something a mindlessly raging animal is apt to be able to do.) From here, 28 Weeks Later is sort of like yet another version of 10 Little Indians where the countdown is inter-spaced with well-shot violent interludes and some truly questionable decisions on part of the various characters that, if nothing else, leads to a believably depressing ending.
Danny Boyle, when asked about his turn doing second-unit shooting for 28 Weeks Later, stated "There's something about doing something trashy that's great." In turn, there's something about trashy films that make them fun and enjoyable. 28 Weeks Later is trash, if only because of its less than watertight script and emphasis on gore, but at least it is well-made trash: it is definitely well-filmed and adrenaline-charged, and it interests and often scares, but once too often the forced mechanisms of its plot detract from the overall experience. Whereas the first film tried to do something new, this film is basically well-made trash riding on the coattails of its predecessor. As such, it does make a good watch and is easily miles better than, say, the enjoyable but much more truly trashy Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007 / trailer), which is easily equal in its "only in the movies" plot development but embraces its exploitation roots with greater relish and honesty.
That 28 Weeks Later actually works at all says more about Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's directorial abilities than anything else. It'll be interesting to see what he brings out next...